The unequal gains of housing financialization and crisis-response policies: real estate appreciation and rising wealth inequality in Canada and Canada’s largest metropolitan Areas 1999–2023

Source abstract

Despite experiencing rapid house-price inflation as a result of financialization of their housing markets, many nations around the world responded to the global financial crisis (GFC) and then the COVID-19 pandemic by drawing on policies that further financialized mortgage lending, stimulated real estate markets, and deepened housing inaffordability. At the same time, rising inequalities in wealth – including real estate wealth - have emerged as a key social and political issue. Yet the relationships between government stimulus policies, real estate appreciation, and increasing wealth inequality are not yet well understood. This article examines these relationships in Canada via analysis of changes in wealth, assets, and debts – including and especially real estate assets and mortgage debts – among rich and poor quintiles of households from 1999 through 2023, using data from the Survey of Financial Security (SFS). The results demonstrate how changes in wealth, including the wealth benefits of real-estate appreciation and investment, are uneven and have become even more-concentrated among already-wealthy households in Canada, and among households in Canada’s global cities. These findings challenge the assumptions and benevolence of both the general financialization process, as well as these policy interventions for addressing crises, and point to contradictions arising from their application in the Canadian context.